High prices leave Gaza shops bare, people desperate

By Nidal al-Mughrabi

GAZA (Reuters) - For a mother in the Gaza Strip, it isn't just the air strikes, tank shelling, endless gunfire and the daily death of relatives that is painful. It's also the fear she won't be able feed her children because of soaring prices.

Locked inside the coastal slice of land, just 40 km (24 miles) long and up to 12 km wide, with next to no food getting in each day, 1.5 million people are battling to find enough to keep their families alive.

But with supplies tight and demand ever-increasing, market prices have gone through the roof, making more people dependent on the food aid distributed by the United Nations.

"People go to the markets and they find them almost empty of stocks with prices too high," said Umm Talat, an old woman sheltering in the house of a relative in northern Gaza together with her daughter-in-law and her five children.

"There are no salaries, there is no money to spend."

As an example she reels off the price of tomatoes. Whereas three weeks ago a kg sold for 1.5 shekels (about $0.40), now it costs 7 shekels, a rise of around 400 percent.

Most Gazans have little income as it is, making it impossible to afford such price rises.

Instead, more people need to rely on the basic food aid distributed by the U.N.'s Relief and Works Agency, which has been working with Palestinian refugees for 60 years. More than half of Gaza's population depends on UNRWA's hand-outs.